If you're terrible at navigating, it's not necessarily your fault

Mrs. Brad and I spent a week in a rented condo in Portland a few years ago.

Each day, we'd walk around, exploring the city. Each day, I'd leave the condo and immediately head out, convinced I was going in the correct direction. Each day – every single day – I was wrong.

What I thought was north was south.

What I thought was east was west.

Every. Single. Time.

That is still true. When someone tells me to "head north," I only know which way to go if I'm within sight of the North Pole (Which I presume is a large pole with the word "North" written on it).

If someone says to go west, I can confidently head that way only if I'm on the West Coast and can see the ocean (which may be part of my problem: I grew up in a town where I could always see the Pacific Ocean, so I always knew "west," which oriented me).

I'm directionally challenged. I can navigate by map, but not by nature. And I'm not alone. 

Researchers know that's common. Many of us just can't get directions right.

An article in Knowable Magazine says that scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location – or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location – and it’s immediately obvious that some people are much, much better at it than others.

It appears to be partly nature, partly nurture (unless you can see the Pacific Ocean from your childhood front yard). The nurture part makes sense. The more you have to naturally navigate, the better you get. People who live in rural areas are better at naturally navigating than city folk, because they don't have constant street signs and major intersections.

The city residents who are best at navigating tend to live in cities with chaotic street designs – as opposed to a perfect grid, where all streets are parallel or perpendicular. Chaotic cities create better navigation skills.

But there's more to it than that.

Part of the cause may be – and the words "may be" carry a lot of weight in this sentence because researchers aren't settled on the "why" of navigation abilities – the ability to make a mental map of a place, using landmarks. If you're one of those natural navigators, you have a mental picture of where you are and where you're going in relation to other places. Those people (Mrs. Brad is one) have a feel for where things are because they picture them in their head, while the rest of us (like me) just guess, or say things aloud to help us remember ("A couple of blocks from home, there should be that big green building on the left side.")

The point? Like a lot of things, nature and nurture combine to make us good or bad at naturally navigating.

You're not great at it because you're better, you're great at it because of how your mind works and your experiences.

And if you're bad at it, it's not because you're dumb, it's because of nature and the fact that the stupid people who designed Portland put the front door of your rented condo and the streets in a way to confuse you and, by the way, why does your wife make fun of you when you head the wrong way?

It would obviously be easier to navigate if one of two things happened:

• We all could make a mental map of where we are, even without seeing a physical map, or
• There were huge towers with "North," "South," "East" and "West" written on them visible from everywhere.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.